Posted By Matt Rosenberg On February 5, 2013 @ 7:43 AM In Opinions | No Comments

To read the marketing industry press around the Super Bowl, you’d think the game was a sideshow, a delivery system for the real show: the ads. Much has already been written by pundits and pollsters on which ads were the “best.” The idea of arts-like criticism of ads is pretty hilarious. An uncreative ad that sells the more product than the most creative is a very worthy version of “best.”

Because the ads for events like the Super Bowl are a part of the show – and a major part for many people – we at Taykey turned our powerful monitoring technology on all of the ads that ran between kickoff and the final whistle. We pulled in data from over 50,000 sources, from the big boys like Facebook and Twitter to blogs to comment sections on sports and news sites, to see which ads received the most conversation and achieved the highest positive response.

Here are the Top 10:

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Though we honored the ads that inspired the most conversation in our graphic, we gathered data on every commercial that ran.

Nine ads achieved our top sentiment score, meaning the language used in tweets and status updates and other posts around the brand during the game was overwhelmingly positive. But only two of these also achieved the top tier of quantity of conversation. In addition to Budweiser’s feel-good horse trainer and RAM’s Paul Harvey paean to the American farmer, the other top scorers were Pepsi, Best Buy, Blackberry, Bud Light, Century 21, Go Pro, and Gildan Activewear.

Conversely, there was only one sentiment goose-egg: Universal Picture’s The Fast and The Furious 6. While sentiment towards the ad was, on balance, slightly positive, it was the least positive of the lot, significantly below the next poorest scoring ads (a seven-way tie).

Other than cars and iterations of Bud, the most represented category of advertiser was upcoming movies. The list for movies looks like this:

The Fast and The Furious (6.5% of mentions, sentiment score of 0)

Star Trek Into Darkness (2% with a sentiment of 3)

Iron Man (1.7% with a sentiment of 3)

Oz The Great and Powerful (.7% with a sentiment of 4)

The Lone Ranger (.4% with a sentiment of 3)

Of course, just as abstractions of quality carry little value but bragging rights in agency hallways, measures of online conversation don’t by themselves predict ringing cash registers. If you’re Universal Pictures, are you happy to be the studio that got the most people talking, or unhappy that most of them said “meh?”